Your Level 10 Meetings® are productive, your EOS Scorecard™ is trending green, and everyone knows their roles and responsibilities on the Accountability Chart®. From an operational standpoint, the business has had rhythm, accountability, and focus since you’ve been running on EOS.
Then someone on your leadership team asks a loaded question: Is marketing actually helping our company gain traction?
The team might be able to point to a website launch, updated sales collateral, a new campaign, six published blogs, or a successful trade show. But have those activities changed buyer behavior, created qualified opportunities, affected active deals, or made your pipeline more predictable?
It can be super frustrating for companies running on EOS to not know where their marketing efforts stand. The EOS Model has brought structure to priorities, accountability, meetings, and measurement, so marketing should feel just as manageable.
Marketing has a habit of being a bit hazier than sales, finance, or operations. Completed EOS Rocks™ and On-Track Scorecard Measurables can show that work is moving according to plan, but they can’t answer nuanced questions about marketing performance, contribution, or attribution.
Effective EOS marketing means translating the disciplines you already use across the business into the way marketing is planned, measured, discussed, and tied to company performance.
Why a Completed Rock Leaves Two Questions Unanswered
A completed Rock can tell you one thing with confidence: the team finished the priority it committed to for the quarter.
Useful? Absolutely. Complete picture? Not quite.
There are still two questions leadership needs to answer when it comes to Rocks related to your marketing department.
- Was this the right marketing priority to begin with?
- And once it was completed, did it produce the result we wanted?
The first question comes down to strategic alignment. Marketing-related Rocks can’t be created in isolation from the rest of EOS. They should be informed by the direction already established in your Vision/Traction Organizer®, including your Target Market, 3 Uniques, Core Focus, 1-Year Plan, 3-Year Picture, and 10-Year Target.1
In EOS, quarterly Rocks are meant to concentrate the company on the most important priorities that move its annual plan forward.1 If that connection hasn’t been made, you could execute a full quarter of marketing Rocks perfectly and still spend time on work that isn’t moving the company toward where it actually wants to go.
What Ill-Informed Rocks Look Like
- Launching a campaign for an audience that isn’t central to your Target Market
- Publishing content around topics that don’t support the problems your best-fit buyers are trying to solve
- Redesigning a website before clarifying the positioning and differentiation it needs to communicate
- Creating new sales materials that look polished but don’t reflect the company’s 3 Uniques or the direction leadership has agreed to pursue
Every Rock can be marked Done, but marketing can still be pointed in the wrong direction.
Before asking, “What should marketing complete this quarter?” leadership must be able to explain why that priority belongs on the list and how it connects back to the company’s V/TO and growth plans.
Then comes the second question: Even if the Rock was the right one, did it work?
A website can launch on time and still fail to attract more ideal clients, improve qualified conversion, support active opportunities, or feed the pipeline. Completion tells you the work reached the finish line; it doesn’t tell you what happened after it entered the market.
The answer is harder to see in marketing because results often unfold across a long, messy buyer journey. A prospect might find you through search, read an article, return through paid media, attend a webinar, talk to a sales rep, revisit the website, and only then become an opportunity.
Apparently, no one told B2B buyers they were supposed to make attribution easy for us.
So a strong marketing Rock should have more than a SMART-set finish line. Marketing also needs to define what it will watch once the work is live, whether that’s buyer engagement, conversion activity, opportunity progression, sales feedback, or another signal tied to the intended outcome.
Remember Your Scorecard Is a Signal, Not the Full Diagnosis
The EOS Scorecard gives leadership a quick view of business health by focusing on a handful of weekly, leading Measurables that help teams see problems with enough time to act and impact the final outcome.2
EOS marketing needs a deeper reporting layer behind it, but the Scorecard itself shouldn’t transform into a 37-row marketing analytics extravaganza. Keep the report waiting in the wings for when a discussion of Off-Track Measurables is warranted.
Your Scorecard might tell you that qualified opportunity creation is below target, while your marketing dashboard helps explain whether the cause is declining traffic from ICP accounts, weaker conversion, a paid channel becoming less efficient, slower sales follow-up, poor lead quality, or something else.
If you’re finding a place for marketing in your Scorecard, pick the few Measurables that give leadership the clearest early read on whether marketing is healthy. Treat anything Off-Track as an Issue to solve, rather than a number to simply explain and revisit the following week.2 Then let the supporting dashboards outside of the official Scorecard handle the detective work so whoever is accountable for a Measurable can act.
Connect Marketing Strategy Back to the V/TO
EOS marketing goes deeper than molding marketing projects into Rocks and Scorecard Measurables. The marketing strategy itself should map back to the direction defined by the business.
Your Target Market influences your Ideal Customer Profile, buyer groups, targeting criteria, and channel decisions.
Your 3 Uniques shape positioning, differentiation, messaging, campaigns, and sales materials.
Your Core Focus and long-term Vision influence the ideas and subjects your company wants to become known for.
Your 1-Year Plan determines which campaigns, channels, and initiatives deserve time and budget. Then Quarterly Rocks can turn those priorities into focused execution.
Keep in mind the difference between these two practices:
- Marketing inside an EOS-run company: Marketing uses EOS tools because the rest of the organization does.
- Practicing pure EOS marketing: The company’s EOS direction actively shapes marketing goals and decisions.
That connection also makes it easier for leadership to understand why a marketing initiative deserves attention in the first place. Instead of discussing a proposed campaign only in terms of channels, creative, or budget, Marketing can explain which company priority it supports, which audience it must influence, what behavior it is designed to create, and how the team will know whether that behavior is happening.
That’s a much stronger conversation than, “Well, LinkedIn seems like something we should probably be doing.”
Give Sales & Marketing the Same Definition of Traction
Marketing attribution gets even harder when your sales and marketing teams are measuring different versions of progress.
Marketing could be excited about strong engagement and increased conversions, but sales is reporting that opportunity volume hasn’t really changed. And both groups can be reading their own data correctly, which is inconvenient because now nobody gets to win the argument.
A marketing-qualified lead might meet every scoring criterion but still be too early for a sales conversation. A target account can engage heavily with content without involving a decision-maker.
Trying to assign every dollar of revenue neatly to marketing or sales usually misses the way B2B buying actually happens. Shared visibility is more useful.
Have your sales and marketing leaders agree on definitions for traction like qualified responses, sales-ready opportunities, and marketing-sourced vs. marketing-influenced pipeline growth. Marketing interactions that matter should be visible in the CRM, while sales feedback about lead quality, buyer questions, and objections makes its way back to the marketers.
Make Marketing Part of the Machinery
People don’t buy according to your quarterly planning schedule, opportunities don’t close because a Rock turned green, and buyers don’t behave differently just because your Scorecard looks fantastic.
But marketing doesn’t have to be the mysterious seat at the leadership table either.
For EOS-run companies, the work is making the process you already have tell you something useful about the market and what your team must do to meet its demands.
Rocks should connect execution to expected outcomes. Scorecard Measurables should act as early signals. Deeper analytics should explain what’s happening underneath those signals. And IDS should help the team respond before a small problem reaches revenue.
If your company already runs on EOS but your marketing efforts still feel like the part that hasn’t quite clicked into the system, Sagefrog’s EOS Marketing Playbook can help you connect marketing more intentionally to the V/TO, Rocks, Scorecard, Accountability Chart, and the rest of your EOS cadence.
Download a copy of The EOS Marketing Playbook: How to Bring Marketing into Lockstep with Your Business so you can share helpful EOS marketing notes with your team.
Frequently Asked Questions
If our marketing Rocks are 100% complete, why isn’t our pipeline growing?
Rock completion measures execution, not market response. If marketing launched the campaign, updated the website, or created the sales collateral on schedule, the Rock did its job. But pipeline growth depends on what happened after that work reached the market. Start by checking the next few links in the chain. Did the right buyers engage? Did marketing generate qualified opportunities? Did sales actually use the materials marketing created and follow-through on prospects? When a Rock is complete but pipeline doesn’t move, one of those connections can tell you more than adding another project to next quarter’s list.
How do we keep our Level 10 Meeting Scorecard from oversimplifying marketing?
Give the Scorecard one job: Surface the handful of business signals that leadership must know about each week. Keep the diagnostic detail elsewhere. Leadership may monitor qualified opportunities, cost per qualified opportunity, lead-to-opportunity conversion, or another macro indicator. Marketing’s supporting dashboard can contain the campaign, channel, audience, conversion, attribution, and CRM data needed to investigate those numbers. If a Scorecard Measurable goes Off-Track, you already know where to dig without making everyone in the Level 10 Meeting review every ad set, email click, and landing-page conversion.
How can we use IDS when a marketing campaign is underperforming?
Start with the performance signal rather than immediately prescribing the solution. If qualified conversions drop, look at what changed before deciding what to fix. Bring both the marketing data and Sales feedback into the discussion, then choose a focused action that can help confirm or correct the suspected cause. That might mean testing new messaging, refining an audience, correcting attribution, updating follow-up, or changing part of the conversion path. Not every bad week deserves a brand-new Rock. Sometimes it just needs one good IDS conversation.
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